Every year, the Cannes festival faces a handful of controversies, gets into various puddles, unexpected problems explode in its face… and films are screened and bought and sold. For almost all non-film questions, Thierry Frémaux, general delegate – a kind of CEO – of the most important film competition in the world, invariably responds: “Let’s let the films speak.”
But the controversy ends up reaching Cannes, which today, Tuesday, begins its 77th edition and on Saturday, May 25, will reveal its list of winners. For now, MeToo. Last year, the contest started with the screening of Jeanne du Barry, directed by the French Maïwenn, who also starred in it, and with Johnny Depp in the cast. Maïwenn had been reported for attacking a journalist, co-founder of the digital media, weeks before in a Parisian restaurant. Mediapart, attack that she herself recognized on television. Depp was accompanied by controversy since his confrontation with his ex-wife, actress Amber Heard. Yesterday, in a meeting with the press prior to today’s inauguration, Frémaux said: “Last year, as you know, we had some controversies, and we realized it, so this year we decided to organize a festival without controversies to make sure that the main interest for all of us is cinema. So if there are other controversies, it does not concern us.” He did not go into the question of what he would do if pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place, and given the possibility of more reports being published about sexual abusers in French cinema, he assured: “Our selection work is driven by artistic criteria and not by concerns about MeToo. or other scandals. It’s about the movies and whether or not they deserve, aesthetically or artistically, to be there. “There is no ideology that guides the selection committee.”
The debate arises after weeks in which French cinema has commented in whispers on the possibility of publishing a major investigation into sexual abuse in the audiovisual sector. To the point that last week, in Paris Match, The president of the Cannes festival, the German Iris Knobloch, responded in an interview that when the accusations were made public “they would be studied case by case.” Mediapart has denied that they are about to publish something on this matter and in The Figaro They warn that the festival has hired a public relations firm to advise it if the storm breaks out.
The confirmation of this problem in French cinema has multiplied in recent months: the president of the CNC (like the Spanish Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts) will be tried in June for alleged sexual abuse of his godson; the actor Gérard Depardieu faces another trial for accusations of sexual assault and the actress Judith Godrèche has managed to get the French Assembly to create a commission to investigate the attacks in the audiovisual industry in her country, after denouncing, first, two directors, Jacques Doillon and Benoît Jacquot, for alleged rape, and making a powerful speech at the last edition of the Césars, the French Oscars. Godrèche will premiere on Wednesday, at the opening of the Un Certain Regard section, a 17-minute short film, titled Moi Aussi, filmed in one day and built on the more than 6,000 testimonies received from other victims since the moment the filmmaker made public the attacks suffered in her youth.
Last weekend, the mayor of Cannes, David Lisnard, wrote an article in which he compared the Me Too revelations with the investigations of the Stasi, the police of the former German Democratic Republic. “The difference is that some acted in the name of a government with clear objectives, while the current inquisitors do so in the name of popular pressure. From a vertical dictatorship we have ended up in a horizontal tyranny,” he said in L’Opinion. The head of Cannes did not want to comment on the statement, although he did want to comment on whether MeToo will leave its mark on the films: “We will talk about it in five years. It may not be there anymore, but will there be self-censorship by artists? “Will what is happening today, with new social relations and relations between women and men in the world, stimulate new types of stories?”
As an example of the different times that exist between cinema and today, Frémaux gave as an example The beauty of Gaza, by Yolande Zauberman, which will be screened in the Special Sessions section and which, despite its title, has nothing to do with Israel’s invasion of that area, confirms Frémaux: “It is a documentary about a young trans Palestinian who flies from Gaza to Tel Aviv to discover that he is not alone.” Although they will continue to support Ukraine in its defense of the Russian attack, “as confirmed by the screening of the documentary The Invasion, by Sergei Loznitsa”, or the fight of Iranian filmmakers “against the dictatorship that governs their country and that is persecuting their creators.”
Rasoulof’s probable trip to Cannes
For this reason, the contest – in which 22 films will be screened and in which, like last year, there will be little presence of female directors and instead of films directed by veterans of auteur cinema – closes in 11 days with The seed of the sacred fig tree, of Mohammad Rasoulof, who a week ago was sentenced to eight years in prison, lashes and the confiscation of his property for the crime of “collusion with the intention of committing crimes against the security of the country.” Mid-afternoon yesterday, the filmmaker released a statement from an “undisclosed location” in Europe, in which he declared: “With a heavy heart, I have chosen exile. The Islamic Republic confiscated my passport in September 2017. Therefore, I had to leave Iran secretly.” And after pressure from the Government of his country to withdraw his new work from the Cannes competition, he decided to go into exile: “I knew that my new film would increase my sentence. “I didn’t have much time to make a decision, and choose between going to jail or leaving Iran.” It has not yet been confirmed that Rasoulof will defend his film on La Croisette, but his presence now seems likely.
![Installation of the red carpet in Cannes, Monday afternoon.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/ZYJ46HYD3HCN53EJ5K2JJTVN2A.jpg?auth=a8aa301ca166333b0714c23c061cbdadb3481d829a9e1dd8e0bd282b792c32e5&width=414)
The director of the festival also did not want to enter into the demands of the Sous les écrans la dèche workers’ collective, an independent group of the unions that has threatened to go on strike if the pageant does not meet their demands for salary increases and improvements in unemployment benefits. His work in Cannes and other film events, such as the Lumière competition in Lyon (which Frémaux also directs) and Bordeaux, involves contracts of a few weeks. However, they are not covered by France’s unemployment insurance program, as is the case with other workers in the cultural sector, the so-called intermittent workers, who achieved a more protectionist special consideration from French Social Security.
“We are talking to them and negotiating. “Everyone wants to avoid a strike,” said Frémaux. Yesterday the same number of workers were seen at the entrances to the Festival Palace and in the offices as in other editions, although it is evidently better to launch a demand at the opening of the event, in which, by the way, a Palme d’Or will be awarded. Honor Meryl Streep. 600 people work in the event to serve the 35,000 accredited people who make up the festival and the market that takes place in parallel. In addition, 500 members of different security forces patrol and monitor the event.
![Greta Gerwig, president of the jury, signs autographs at the entrance of the Martinez hotel on Monday afternoon in Cannes.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/57EML6P52LXQYYXEJ6I2AHUHUM.jpg?auth=2aebd3457d3bd4aaa1b57f0a789f39e02ff9b735a06012802defbae54ec63f6e&width=414)
The festival will not want to echo the most stark current events, although it does like to enjoy more glamorous moments. Like the Olympic torch will be on the red carpet on Tuesday the 21st, accompanying the premiere of the documentary Olympians! La France des Jeux, as a warm-up for the Paris Olympic Games, which open on July 26, or the presence of the president of the jury, Greta Gerwig, after the success last summer of her Barbie, film that Cannes wanted to schedule and that was not ready for May 2023. According to Frémaux, “she is a young creator who has made an independent work for the general public,” and that he personally admires.
Among other notable titles, they will be seen for the first time in Cannes Megalopolis, by Francis Ford Coppola, a title for which the contest has struggled to program and which it has finally achieved; the musical Emilia Perez, by Jacques Audiard, about the transition to wife of a leader of a Mexican drug trafficking cartel; Kinds of Kindness, in which Yorgos Lanthimos repeats with Emma Stone; Bird, by Andrea Arnold; either Limonov, the biography of a fascinating character who touched the most critical moments of the 20th century, to whom Emmanuel Carrère dedicated a book that has ended up on the big screen, adapted by Kiril Serébrennikov. “Cinema reflects history, but you have to understand it as art, you don’t have to go beyond it,” said the festival manager. And his example is The Apprentice, by Ali Abbasi, about Donald Trump’s first steps as a real estate shark, just in the year in which the presidential elections will be held in the United States. “In Cannes, politics should be on the screen. When we gave the Palme d’Or to Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11Did that have an impact on George Bush’s re-election? No”.
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